9 ms·

That's pretty crazy when you see that in developed countries, Japan in particular, population is aging and declining. Countries should be competing for the bes

That's pretty crazy when you see that in developed countries, Japan in particular, population is aging and declining. Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.

boelboel 4mo ago
Do people starting an 'airbnb' business help with the aging problem? Same thing with some of the other immigrants. They're not really creating economical value as much as they're competing with natives taking the 'easy part'.
kakacik 4mo ago
Yeah, but folks doing scams to get visas are hardly the "best immigrants", rather amoral scum that is largely incompatible with mentality and moral values of host country. Clearly not the type of immigration they desperately want, can't blame them
Levitz 4mo ago
Countries are not concerned about a lack of willing immigrants, and so they close their doors so the ones they want are the ones that get in.
aurareturn 4mo ago
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors. Don't mistake what the elites want with what working class people want. Elites want a higher population - even if they're immigrants - so the market grows bigger for their businesses. But immigrants come with many problems for the working class people. The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle. Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.
- mmooss 4mo ago
  > a house next to immigrants This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them. The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood. > lower quality Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.
  - aurareturn 4mo ago
    I'm explaining why Japan is doing this. A lot of people don't understand why Japan would do this when their population is already declining. It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling. To businesses and governments, a declining population means lower market size and lower tax income. They're incentivized to want a larger population - sometimes by any means necessary. And no, you can't mass import high quality immigrants because high quality immigrants have options and generally don't want to move to a country that isn't their culture or speak their own language. You will always end up with lower quality immigrants from the 3rd world.
    - mmooss 4mo ago
      > Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling. Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide. > quality Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your preference or personal benefit - and economics and history clearly show the benefit of more people with freedom and opportunity, including to the people gaining freedom and opportunity. They are as important as, and have as much 'quality' as you - otherwise, you are not important either.
      - aurareturn 4mo ago
jiaosdjf 4mo ago
There is no "competing for the best immigrants". Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany. Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people) The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live. We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.
- defrost 4mo ago
  > I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country .. To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?
- ffaccount2 4mo ago
  >will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
  - eunos 4mo ago
    Let's say it's an absolute majority
    - decimalenough 4mo ago
      Not even close. There's actual data on this, and more high net worth individuals go to UAE, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia and even Israel than the US. https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-going/ https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-goi...
ElProlactin 4mo ago
The problem is that identifying who the "best" immigrants are for your country can be very difficult when thousands upon thousands of people are trying to game the system. Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there. I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most. It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
- Scoundreller 4mo ago
  And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. Your best prospects have lots of options and can take a path of lower resistance. Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.
  - ElProlactin 4mo ago
    > And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. This isn't actually true in all instances. You can literally buy residency (or even citizenship) in numerous countries, so anyone who is optimizing for the path of least resistance will always have options. Japan is a very unique destination. It's one of the most developed countries in the world, with world-class infrastructure, a super interesting culture, great food, abundant nature, etc. For Westerners, housing is relatively inexpensive in much of the country, with tons of akiya (empty houses) available for purchase because foreigners can (at least for the time being) buy property with few restrictions. Due to the weak currency, very few developed countries (and basically none in Asia) are as affordable to Westerners. The problem with the business manager visa is that many of the people obtaining it weren't really interested in running businesses in Japan. They were setting up shell companies to get residency. Raising the capital requirement and adding new requirements around employment and language will no doubt hurt some legitimate business manager visa holders but realistically, the number of people running legitimate businesses in Japan who might have to leave will be dwarfed by the number of people who used the visa as a workaround to get residency.
mytailorisrich 4mo ago
This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and consumers... Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.
- kmeisthax 4mo ago
  "Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it. As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound. Anyway, migration is a human right. What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny. For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"! So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right. Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them. But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it! [0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are. [1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
dindunuf 4mo ago
[flagged]
- mmooss 4mo ago
  Those are four of the most free and wealthiest countries in the world, with the highest standards of living. > insanity What is the end of hate and oppression of immigrants, gay people, racial minorities, the working class ...? The point is to get people to embrace hate and oppression. The (overused) trope is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. What has been the result of institutionalized racism and discarding human rights? It's already horrible for many people.
  - dindunuf 4mo ago
    it appears I did not make the point I was trying to make stand out enough, so I'll do it again: even the countries who are importing unbelievable numbers of aliens have not halted, let alone reversed, their ongoing demographic collapse. it's not an opinion or a speculation - we literally have the data. and with that indisputable fact in mind, I find the sentiment that "without immigrants, Japan will not survive", expressed ad nauseam whenever Japan is mentioned, to be somewhat detached from our shared reality.

That's pretty crazy when you see that in developed countries, Japan in particular, population is aging and declining. Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.

boelboel 4mo ago

Do people starting an 'airbnb' business help with the aging problem? Same thing with some of the other immigrants. They're not really creating economical value as much as they're competing with natives taking the 'easy part'.

kakacik 4mo ago

Yeah, but folks doing scams to get visas are hardly the "best immigrants", rather amoral scum that is largely incompatible with mentality and moral values of host country. Clearly not the type of immigration they desperately want, can't blame them

Levitz 4mo ago

Countries are not concerned about a lack of willing immigrants, and so they close their doors so the ones they want are the ones that get in.

aurareturn 4mo ago

Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors. Don't mistake what the elites want with what working class people want. Elites want a higher population - even if they're immigrants - so the market grows bigger for their businesses. But immigrants come with many problems for the working class people. The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle. Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.

mmooss 4mo ago
> a house next to immigrants This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them. The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood. > lower quality Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.
- aurareturn 4mo ago
  I'm explaining why Japan is doing this. A lot of people don't understand why Japan would do this when their population is already declining. It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling. To businesses and governments, a declining population means lower market size and lower tax income. They're incentivized to want a larger population - sometimes by any means necessary. And no, you can't mass import high quality immigrants because high quality immigrants have options and generally don't want to move to a country that isn't their culture or speak their own language. You will always end up with lower quality immigrants from the 3rd world.
  - mmooss 4mo ago
    > Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling. Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide. > quality Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your preference or personal benefit - and economics and history clearly show the benefit of more people with freedom and opportunity, including to the people gaining freedom and opportunity. They are as important as, and have as much 'quality' as you - otherwise, you are not important either.
    - aurareturn 4mo ago

jiaosdjf 4mo ago

There is no "competing for the best immigrants". Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany. Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people) The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live. We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.

defrost 4mo ago
> I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country .. To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?
ffaccount2 4mo ago
>will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
- eunos 4mo ago
  Let's say it's an absolute majority
  - decimalenough 4mo ago
    Not even close. There's actual data on this, and more high net worth individuals go to UAE, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia and even Israel than the US. https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-going/ https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-goi...

ElProlactin 4mo ago

The problem is that identifying who the "best" immigrants are for your country can be very difficult when thousands upon thousands of people are trying to game the system. Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there. I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most. It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.

Scoundreller 4mo ago
And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. Your best prospects have lots of options and can take a path of lower resistance. Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.
- ElProlactin 4mo ago
  > And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. This isn't actually true in all instances. You can literally buy residency (or even citizenship) in numerous countries, so anyone who is optimizing for the path of least resistance will always have options. Japan is a very unique destination. It's one of the most developed countries in the world, with world-class infrastructure, a super interesting culture, great food, abundant nature, etc. For Westerners, housing is relatively inexpensive in much of the country, with tons of akiya (empty houses) available for purchase because foreigners can (at least for the time being) buy property with few restrictions. Due to the weak currency, very few developed countries (and basically none in Asia) are as affordable to Westerners. The problem with the business manager visa is that many of the people obtaining it weren't really interested in running businesses in Japan. They were setting up shell companies to get residency. Raising the capital requirement and adding new requirements around employment and language will no doubt hurt some legitimate business manager visa holders but realistically, the number of people running legitimate businesses in Japan who might have to leave will be dwarfed by the number of people who used the visa as a workaround to get residency.

mytailorisrich 4mo ago

This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and consumers... Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.

kmeisthax 4mo ago
"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it. As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound. Anyway, migration is a human right. What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny. For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"! So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right. Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them. But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it! [0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are. [1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.

dindunuf 4mo ago

[flagged]

mmooss 4mo ago
Those are four of the most free and wealthiest countries in the world, with the highest standards of living. > insanity What is the end of hate and oppression of immigrants, gay people, racial minorities, the working class ...? The point is to get people to embrace hate and oppression. The (overused) trope is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. What has been the result of institutionalized racism and discarding human rights? It's already horrible for many people.
- dindunuf 4mo ago
  it appears I did not make the point I was trying to make stand out enough, so I'll do it again: even the countries who are importing unbelievable numbers of aliens have not halted, let alone reversed, their ongoing demographic collapse. it's not an opinion or a speculation - we literally have the data. and with that indisputable fact in mind, I find the sentiment that "without immigrants, Japan will not survive", expressed ad nauseam whenever Japan is mentioned, to be somewhat detached from our shared reality.